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February 10, 2003

Boundaries of Scientific Work: An interview with Biologist Robert Pollack

The first thing that struck me upon meeting Robert Pollack was his modesty. Talking about himself and his work doesn’t come naturally for him. He seems almost uncomfortable with it. And that’s strange (though admirable) coming from someone as accomplished as he: a former colleague and understudy of James Watson (that’s right, the discoverer of the structure of DNA), Pollack’s specialty as a biologist is his cancer research, which helped build his reputation as a Professor of Biological Sciences at Columbia University. But more recently, he’s been director of the Center for the Study of Science and Religion, which he runs from inside the Union Theological Seminary in New York. What follows is a transcript of my interview with him.

Q: You were trained as a molecular biologist, but right now your offices are located in the Union Theological Seminary. Why?

A: Well, first of all, this interview is going to go on in the context of work that is more important than what I’m going to say. I am a scientist, and I am a tenured professor, and so I take my job to be to attempt to understand questions that I think I can reasonably expect to understand. Those deal with questions about nature, but also include inquiries about the boundary between what is understandable and what is not, or whether there is such a boundary in the first place.

The most recent book I wrote (i.e., The Faith of Biology and the Biology of Faith: Order, Meaning and Free Will in Modern Science (2000)), is about the possibility of a boundary beyond which things are intrinsically not understandable; the possibility that all of science works within boundaries and that science does help explain nature but does not cross the line. I argue that to believe that there is no such boundary [between what can be understood and what cannot be understood] is a religious conviction since there is no proof that has shown otherwise. And the people holding the conviction that science has no boundaries are scientists who adhere to the religion of science. I am a scientist but do not have the religion of science. Accepting the possibility that some things cannot be understood by science or rationality, I am drawn to those people whose work and whose skills lie in understanding things besides understanding, or experiences things in other ways besides understanding. Such people ordinarily fall into the rubric of being religious people. So the President of the Union Theological Seminary interpreted me to be a person who brings science to this institution, and I interpreted him to be someone who could provide us with a place that was safe for questions that did not get answered through science. So here we are.

Q: What can you tell us about the Center for the Study of Science and Religion? You started it in 1999. Has it allowed you to develop a vocabulary for exploring your ideas about science and its limits?

A: Interesting question. I don’t deal in such a level of abstraction. If you look at the programs we offer, that is our vocabulary. It is a vocabulary of action. I think it is important to have good intentions, and it is important to be effective. It is possible to be effective without knowing one’s intentions, but there is the risk of being effective in a bad way. The trick is to make manifest one’s good intentions by acts that in retrospect turn out to be good. And that is not easy. But it is not a vocabulary question, it is a question about what you do. Not what you say, but what you do.

My colleague at the Center for the Study of Science and Religion Andrea Villanti, for example, is setting up a course of programs and lectures with people at the Union Theological Seminary. She is preparing a seminar on bio-terrorism and bio-terrorism preparedness. I will be teaching this fall an undergraduate course [at Columbia College] on science and religion east and west, co-taught with Robert Thurman, a highly regarded priest in Tibetan Buddhism as well as a writer, and Joe Loizzo, an M.D. psychiatrist with a Ph.D. in Religion. We will try to lay out what one means by science in the Eastern world, that is to say, in an inward or mental or contemplative context, rather than an experimental one.

Q: Have you had experience before working with people outside your immediate area of academic expertise?

A: No, not really. However, this is not something done at a distance. [The course] is really the extension of a conversation rather than the emergence of something new. My colleagues [Robert Thurman, Joseph Loizzo], and I are all polymaths to a certain extent and our overlap is just a manifestation of our being interested in things beyond our areas of expertise.

Q: But aren’t polymaths frowned upon in a university context?

A: I don’t know. Those kind of questions have the sentence structure that lacks a subject. That is to say, frowned upon by whom? The passive presumption is that there is a spiritual genie of the university that makes judgments. But there is not. There is a condominium of individual faculty, students, and the tenured version of students – alumni. Those of us committed to stay within the university are defined by what we do. It is a false Platonic ideal to imagine there is “the university” against which you measure your actions. The actions in sum become what the university is. So what I am doing is what a university professor does, by definition, of who I am. I do not sense that there is an ideal university against which I measure myself, in the same way that there is not an ideal “human being” against which I measure myself.

What I am doing is normative. It is not new. It is not a revolution. In the university, we are supposed to find the next subject. I work with a guy named James Watson. I would say that what he has done in educational terms is almost as important as his discovery [of the structure of DNA]. In the writing of a book called The Molecular Biology of the Gene (1965), he created a textbook out of which came the subject of molecular biology, departments of molecular biology, recombinant DNA, and the genetic revolution. All of that came from his personal writing style and his ability to write a textbook with declarative statements.

Q: What is the perception of the work you are doing within the scientific community?

A: I don’t know. You see, it’s the second example of the same structure. I don’t know that there are “scientists.” There are individual scientists, but in my forty plus years I never met with “scientists”. I always met with a group of people. In other words, you may think scientists have “an” opinion, but scientists have opinions. Among the people who know me, some think I am wasting my time, some think that what I am doing is interesting, and there is a small number who wish to work with me. But I am not in this to impress people. In other words, a price to pay for your own convictions is to be alone with them sometimes…. And that is not a big deal, as long as the people you are with are nice. And the Center for the Study of Science and Religion has been an experiment in being effective and nice. We are not competing, we are not looking to win, we want to help people and be nice. It an academic operation in a way that professionalized academia cannot be.

Q: In your book Signs of Life: The Language and Meaning of DNA (1994), you talk about the idea of looking at DNA as text. Does this bear any relation to your professional pursuits?

A: Yes. The book has enabled me to remain interested in DNA, that is, if I fancy myself as someone who writes books, I am not therefore necessarily someone who ceases to be interested in [scientific] data. You can take that metaphor and cut it the other way. Text includes DNA. That is to say, if you are interested in writing, you should also be interested in DNA, the text that makes your own body and mind. The book stakes out the position that it is possible to be a writer and not give up being a scientist. I do not have a lab, but I have not left the question of what scientific data “means”. In DNA terms, scientific data asks the question, “What does this text mean?” The book has helped me understand my work in that it says that as there is no final meaning to a text, there is no final meaning to a person through his or her DNA-based inheritance. Put another way, cultural context dominates our understanding of anything important about a healthy person.

Data in a scientific context are different from anything else in the rest of the world. The scientific process sets up a clear field in which it is possible to attach a single apparent meaning to a text. You look at an experimental manipulation of DNA, you have a very clear interpretation of what you see. But when you ask about DNA as it exists in nature, it is not so clear at all. That difference between the clarity of meaning of a text in a scientific context and the non-clarity of a text in any other context makes science different from other cultural pursuits. I lived a long time inside science thinking the rest of the world was intrinsically unclear. But I think that unclarity in the rest of the world includes unclarity in my own mind about other questions which I think are important, and I have learned to accept unclarity as part of the condition of life.

Q: What projects are you working on at the moment?

A: I’m trying to decide whether to write a book about optimal ways of doing science as distinct from the easiest way of doing science. Is there a better way to do science than the more efficient way? The better way would be to think in a context that allows you to think about the long-term consequences of your work. To think about data with a social consciousness is a novel idea to most of my colleagues.